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Tag Archives: squirrel

Two baby squirrels rescued by local police in Poltava, Ukraine have found shelter and love in the unlikely form of a cat taking on the role of mother. Oddly enough, the cat’s named is “Belka”, which in Ukrainian, translates to “squirrel.” I guess it was just meant to be. ^_^

A squirrel POV video has been very popular this week, of a squirrel stealing a GoPro camera up into a tree with him. If you haven’t seen it, here it is: https://youtu.be/f5pWODpIZ4s

What most people haven’t seen, is this “behind the scenes” video, of how the videographer (youtube username: Viva Frei) was able to get the squirrel to take the camera in the first place, to make this awesome video. So, here’s your answer:

Most longtime New Yorkers have adopted habits to cope with life in a city of more than eight million people. A new stud finds that even the city’s squirrels have made adjustments in order to better co-exist with people- in fact, they barely seem to notice them at all. Compared to rural squirrels, city squirrels allow pedestrians to come relatively close, and only move away when they feel people’s eyes intently watching them. This suggests that they can clearly discriminate between threatening and nonthreatening behavior.

“Some animal species never behaviorally adapt to humans- they always run when they see them,” Bill Bateman, a biologist at Curtin University in Australia, who led the study, said this in an email: “if an animal runs when it sees a human, it is because it sees the human as a and is prepared to stop doing what it is doing to escape. It pays a cost of stopping eating, or courting, but that is better than possibly being caught.”

In rural areas, most country squirrels view humans as potential predators. They become cautious and alert around people, keeping their distance, whether or not the human is looking directly at them. Bateman observed Eastern gray squirrels in a residential area in Manhattan’s highly populated and extremely busy Lower East Side. He dropped colored pins on the ground to measure the squirrels’ “alert distance,” or the distance between a squirrel and an observer once the squirrel was aware it was being watched. Bateman also measured the “distance fled,” or how far the squirrel distanced itself from the observer.

Ninety percent of the squirrels moved out of the way when they noticed humans walking on a footpath, while only 5 percent stopped, froze and showed signs of being alert and vigilant, like a deer in headlights. Bateman said city squirrels are aware that humans are everywhere and that they can’t run away all the time as a country squirrel would.

“In the city, the squirrels have honed this reaction down to tiny cues: Are the humans looking at me? That indicates higher risk than them ignoring me,” Bateman said.

Animals should still be sensitive to the potential threat of humans, but to be able to live freely in the presence of humans is one of the key behavioral traits of a successful urban adapter. Bateman and his co-author wrote in their study, published June 12 in the Journal of Zoology, that these animals don’t see humans quite as predators. In fact, humans might become “predation-free predators,” the researchers said, and so the animals ignore people, rather than react fearfully. Armed with this lack of fear, the animals are in a better position to thrive and persist in the urban environment.

As urban areas continue to grow around the world, more wildlife may need to adapt to city life. In the future, Bateman would like to explore the behavior of birds, mammals and reptiles in Australia that thrive in urban areas full of human activity.